Roadmap to the Fall 2017 CNI Membership Meeting

Meeting Roadmap

A Guide to the Fall 2017
Coalition for Networked Information Membership Meeting

The Fall 2017 CNI Membership Meeting, to be held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC on December 11 and 12, offers a wide range of presentations that advance and report on CNI’s programs, showcase projects underway at member institutions, and highlight important national and international developments. Here is the “roadmap” to the meeting, which includes both plenary events and an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current developments in digital information. As always, we have strived to present sessions that reflect late-breaking developments and also take advantage of our venue in the Washington, DC area to provide opportunities to interact with policy makers and funders.

As usual, the CNI meeting proper is preceded by an optional orientation session for new attendees, both representatives of new member organizations and new representatives or alternate delegates from existing member organizations, at 11:30 AM; guests and presenters are also welcome. Light refreshments are available for all at 12:15 PM on Monday, December 11. The opening plenary is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by four rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, December 12, includes four additional rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch and the closing plenary, concluding around 3:30 PM. At this meeting, we are continuing to offer breakout sessions of different duration, including half-hour sessions, allowing us to add one more round and provide you with more opportunities to learn about new initiatives. Some of the hour-long sessions are actually pairs of these half-hour sessions that are thematically related. Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting includes generous break time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception which will run until 7:30 PM on Monday evening, December 11, after which participants can enjoy a wide range of dining opportunities in Washington.

The CNI meeting agenda is subject to last-minute changes, particularly in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current information on our website, cni.org, and on the announcements board near the registration desk at the meeting. Information about wireless access in the meeting room areas will be available in your packets and at the registration table; those staying in the CNI hotel room block at the Omni Shoreham should also have free wireless access in their rooms. In addition, we are running the mobile-friendly web app Sched from the meeting website to facilitate online access to the meeting schedule. And we’ll still have printed programs available for all, of course.

The Plenary Sessions

As is now traditional, I have reserved the opening plenary of our winter member meeting for an update.

During this session, scheduled to start at 1:15 PM on Monday, I want to look at recent developments and the ways in which the landscape is changing and identify some key developments I expect to see in the coming years. As part of this, I’ll discuss progress on the Coalition’s agenda, and highlight selected initiatives from the 2017-2018 Program Plan. The Program Plan will be distributed at the meeting (and will be available electronically on the Coalition’s website, cni.org, in early December). I look forward to sharing the Coalition’s continually evolving strategy with you, as well as discussing recent events and current issues. The opening plenary will include time for questions and discussion, and I am eager to hear your comments.

Our closing plenary speaker on Tuesday afternoon will be Herbert Van de Sompel, who is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award. At the plenary, he will deliver the Peters Memorial Lecture, which will address his latest thinking on future directions for scholarly communication, with particular consideration of developments in the Decentralized Web movement. You can see an abstract for this session on our website; it promises to be provocative and thought-provoking. The talk is titled “Scholarly Communications: Deconstruct and Decentralize?”

Herbert is well known to the CNI community. A leading researcher and information scientist, he has had a distinguished and very fruitful career and has spent his last fifteen years at Los Alamos (you can find a full biography on our website). I am thrilled that Herbert is receiving this award and very proud to have known him and followed his amazing career for two decades; I had the privilege of serving as an outside member on his Ph.D. thesis defense at Ghent University in 2000. He is a consistently insightful and innovative thinker, and this should be a memorable talk.

Highlighted Breakout Sessions

I will not attempt to comprehensively summarize the wealth of breakout sessions here; with the new assortment of time slots, the number of sessions we can offer has become very large. However, I want to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the Coalition’s 2017-2018 Program Plan, as well as many other sessions of special interest or importance, and to provide some additional context that may be helpful to attendees in making choices. We have a packed agenda of breakout sessions, and, as always, will try to put material from these sessions on our website following the meeting for those who were unable to attend. We will also be capturing a few sessions for later distribution, some using traditional video capture and some using a voice over visuals capture system; these will be noted on the conference message board.

We have a particularly strong set of sessions on many aspects of repositories. At the CNI Executive Roundtables in April 2017, some of the participants spoke about what they believed was the next stage in thinking about an ecosystem to support scholarship of their institutional communities. Carnegie Mellon University will present their strategy for building a more robust set of systems to support their researchers, including an interconnected Current Research Information System (CRIS) along with a new repository powered by the figshare platform. In From Stock to Flows, Cal Tech will describe its design for a system to redirect resources toward their institution’s research outputs and workflows along with an architecture for sharing data and other content.

Additional sessions on repositories:

• In Seven Years of Libra at UVA, the University of Virginia will describe its move to a modular repository system.
• The Bridge2Hyku session will describe the development of a toolkit by the University of Houston to assist libraries with migrating to the Hyku platform.
• Shared Repository Infrastructure will report on a study that examines 115 research university repositories.
• The University of Pennsylvania will present plans to rethink its institutional repository, especially in light of the Elsevier acquisition of bepress.
• A session led by the Jean-Gabriel Bankier, managing director of bepress, will discuss the reactions of the community to the acquisition of the company by Elsevier and will describe plans for the future.
• A report on a study at Cal Poly will examine whether including student-created materials in its repository has a positive impact on the visibility of faculty scholarship.
• A report on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which has become an increasingly-import and widely implemented standard for digital image repository interoperability, will provide an update on that work. Note how often IIIF now appears in various project briefings.
• From First Seeds to Now will feature a description of a harvesting tool developed by bepress that shows publications in relation to affiliated institutions.

A session will focus on two projects aimed at streamlining libraries’ contributions to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): one on the Hydra-in-a-Box project and one on DPLA Exchange and SimplyE, an important new e-book reading platform.

Many CNI member institutions are developing a range of capabilities and organizational strategies related to data services and the support for new scholarly practices (e-research, digital humanities, and digital scholarship). The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) established a project to support shared stewardship of research data through a network of expertise; they will present their vision for seamless access to research data management platforms and services for Canadian institutions and researchers.

Additional sessions on data and e-research/scholarship include:

• a report on the Data Science in Libraries workshop, including a roadmap to integrating data science in libraries
• a description of what the California Digital Library (CDL) has discovered about research data management by talking directly to researchers and an update on the tools that they are developing as a result
• A Strategic Framework for Institutional Research Data Curation, highlighting a report from an EDUCAUSE working group
• the session Data Capsule Appliance, on the important topic of providing access to restricted or sensitive data for research analysis
• Always Already Computational, an effort to examine collections as data
• a description of the development of a digital scholarship center at Rowan University

Other sessions will focus on new types of researcher practice and services to support them. Nick Shockey from SPARC will talk about engaging the next generation of researchers and librarians to advance open practices. American University will describe its experience in bringing faculty together in a conference to discuss new developments in research and the changing roles of the scholar as policy influencer and public intellectual in Tying the University Library to High Impact Research. In Research Outputs: You Want Me to Do What?!? a panel will examine the challenges and possible solution to develop a new approach to increase visibility, impact, and compliance of research outputs and data. Two institutions will describe their Research Sprints programs, which target outreach to highlight librarians’ skillsets to work in partnership with faculty, and the California Digital Library will discuss its Library Carpentry Program to increase the skills of librarians working with data.

A number of sessions will address scholarly communications and new types of collections. We anticipate a lively discussion in a session on the 2.5% Commitment Initiative, which proposes that academic libraries contribute 2.5% of their budget to support open infrastructure and content. Carnegie Mellon University will describe its project to create a center for digital research and publishing, in partnership with the university’s college of humanities and social sciences. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal System (OJS) publishing platform, used by many academic institutions, is undergoing a review and we will learn about their plans for the future. CNI attendees will be invited to provide feedback on ways this initiative can continue to have the most impact possible. Colleagues from Germany will present the open source platform they have developed for hosting encyclopedia content. Martin Klein, a colleague of Herbert Van de Sompel at Los Alamos National Labs will describe comparing a study of focused crawls and Memento in conjunction with multiple web archives as techniques to build topical collections. The session New Social Welfare History Image Portal, created by partners from the library and museum communities, will describe how the tool promotes access to historical materials related to social reform movements. Rensselaer Polytechnic will demonstrate a digital platform for people to create and share multimodal interactive stories using digital library archives.

Libraries and museums partner to leverage collections and expertise. A presentation by Kansas State University will highlight how the library assisted the local museum to develop a replacement for its art display web application.

Two sessions will highlight how content is being made more available to researchers, including independent researchers: Serving Individual Researchers, describing the JSTOR Access Model and the Open Access Button for interlibrary loan systems.

Digital preservation and curation play a prominent role in CNI’s agenda. Tom Hickerson and Annie Murray of the University of Calgary will describe the project to migrate and preserve audio and video recordings in a major collection recently received by the university, the complete archive of EMI Music Canada and its partner labels. An increasing number of institutions are participating in dark preservation services, but there has not been enough attention paid to the problem of tracking data from a local repository to a distributed preservation service; a session on this topic, Beyond the Repository, will present findings from a recent study. We will hear a report from the APTrust on how it is fitting the digital preservation strategies of its members after three years as a production service. Representatives from the Fedora community will discuss a common file system that specifies how repository resources are structured and stored on disk or compressed archives. The Web Archiving Systems API Initiative is concluding an effort to understand how we could develop standardized interfaces and data exchange approaches; we’ll have a report on their findings.

Discovery, interoperability, and linked data are topics of interest to many in the CNI community. In the session Discovery in 2017, a panel of representatives from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ithaka S+R, and EBSCO will examine the current state of library discovery systems in the context of identified user needs and search behaviors. Improving Access and Delivery for Special Collections and Archives will highlight projects from the University of Florida and Stanford.

Additional sessions on discovery, interoperability, and linked data will report on:

• a project at Notre Dame to enhance cross-disciplinary discovery through development of a research tool called Convocate
• a new version of the Solr discovery interface used at the University of Pennsylvania is combining records from HathiTrust with other record sets and grouping them in new ways
• the JSTOR Labs recently-released Text Analyzer, a new way to search which allows users to upload their own document to initiate a search to find similar articles on the topic; the tool and collaboration with Columbia University will be described in Creating a New Way to Search
• Johns Hopkins University’s mechanism for faceted browsing and searching of separate medieval manuscript collections
• different approaches to shared discovery of collections in A Tale of Two Collaborations, by panelists from the Triangle Research Libraries Network and Ivy Plus
• a pair of projects to make it easier for libraries and their users to create, use, and benefit from linked data – the Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) Labs and Linked Data for (Metadata) Production (LD4P)
• the National Library of Medicine project to add Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to MeSH MARC authority records in preparation for the likely for move to a linked data environment

Sessions focusing on technical standards will include one on biodiversity information standards and one on annotation and publishing standards work at W3C.

Explorations of how organizations are developing new services and engaging communities are also key components of CNI’s program. A panel with presenters from the University of Rhode Island, North Carolina State University, and Yewno will describe how artificial intelligence (AI) is being and will be used in libraries.

A topic receiving increasing attention is the need to design information systems that account for diverse cultural materials and perspectives. A presentation on the Northeastern University  “Design for Diversity” project will provide some of the foundational ideas of the project, results of their environmental scan, and outcomes of their first working meeting. We will learn about the outcome of a study investigating how Georgetown University Library can become a world leader in the study of slavery, memory and reconciliation, an outcome of the university’s extensive review of its early connections to American slavery.

New types of spaces are often developed to support innovative programs and technologies. The new Wilmeth Active Learning Center at Purdue University combines active learning classrooms with library study spaces; James Mullins will describe elements of the space and the facility’s embrace by the community. Presenters from the University of Michigan will describe their plan to design a service framework and space strategy to guide their organization’s work into the future.

Johns Hopkins University Press, Project MUSE and the Sheridan Libraries are developing an interesting set of open educational resources (OERs) through the Black Press in America Project. The presenters will demonstrate the prototype of this innovative project.

Various aspects of analytics will be described in several briefings. The University of Texas will discuss the complexity of collecting data about use of makerspaces in the context of broader assessment practices. The University of Michigan is exploring library analytics for transforming their instruction program. We’ll have a report from Jisc on several initiatives to gather, manage, and analyze e-resource usage data.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will present an update on its National Digital Platform program and will also participate in a separate session, along with representatives from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) on funding priorities and trends.

I invite you to browse the complete list of breakout sessions and their full abstracts on the CNI website. In many cases you will find these abstracts include pointers to reference material that you may find useful to explore prior to the session, and after the meeting we will add material from the actual presentations, including selected video recordings, when they become available to us. You can also follow the meeting via Twitter, using the hashtag #cni17f.

I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC for what promises to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org), or Joan Lippincott, CNI’s Associate Director (joan@cni.org), if we can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information